Welcome to Nalbari, the proud hometown of Jayanta Malla Bauah- our state’s Public Health Minister.

Minister Baruah is a man showered with praise, celebrated for his vision, and hailed as a guardian of well-being. By all logic, his constituency should have been the shining model of public health... but!

Step into Nalbari with a full bladder, and you will discover the cruel punchline: the town does not have a single public toilet. No, not a single one!

Here, public health is a grand slogan on stage but a daily embarrassment on the street, where relieving yourself is less a right than a desperate gamble.

For visitors, Nalbari is less a town and more a survival drill.

If the nature's call is intense and you are looking for a place to relieve yourself, then brace yourself for marathon as restaurants and shopping malls shrug their shoulders, banks and offices refuse entry, and the alleys behind tea stalls smell so noxious that nausea overtakes you before relief does.

The slightly tipsy may still cling to a lamppost, doglike, but women are left with no such fallback—only humiliation in broad daylight.

And yet, this is no ordinary town. Nalbari once carried the lofty title of the “City of Wisdom.”

Its people were hailed as tigers—brave, fierce, unbending. Today, the tigers remain only in stripes; the roar has dwindled to a polite purr.

The town that once prided itself on intellect now holds contests in sycophancy, with brains pawned off for favour and recognition.

Meanwhile, the minister glides through a bubble of applause. Professors, journalists, businessmen, party workers, and the self-anointed intelligentsia hover around him, careful never to soil their standing with inconvenient truths.

Honest advice risks being mistaken for insolence, so the safer chorus prevails: “Yes, Dada, we are with you.”

Raise the matter openly, and the reaction is as predictable as it is amusing. Overnight, you are branded a “Congress broker,” a “traitor,” or some other colourful epithet whispered in tea stalls.

The labels, of course, sting less than they entertain. The real betrayal lies not in speaking out, but in refusing to tell the minister what Nalbari actually needs.

And what it needs could not be simpler: a few public toilets. Five or six would do for a start.

In fact, their very construction would stand as a more meaningful achievement than all the claps, slogans, and speeches combined.

For true public health does not begin with rhetoric; it begins with the dignity of being able to relieve oneself without shame.

Because in the end, the measure of a civilised town is not how loudly its minister is praised, but how quietly its people can pee.

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